What Does it Mean to be a Community-Based Researcher? Reflections on moving between community and academic spaces, from a Black woman scholar
In this session, I will discuss what it has meant to work in-between the community and the academy, as a PhD student and then as a Postdoctoral Fellow. In my community-based work, I have supported research projects aimed at addressing violence in the Black community, bail and supervision, and restorative justice. In my own project, I am exploring the experiences of Black women who have been incarcerated in provincial correctional facilities. In this session, I explore the liminal space of living between two places: the academy and the community, and the difficulty - near impossibility - of trying to fit into two places at the same time. What I hope academics leave with is some appreciation of the strain and kinds of burdens that come with working in community, and that productivity must be considered differently from how it is measured in the academy. What I hope community-based researchers, or community members who work in justice, leave with is an acknowledgment of how challenging it can be to both build a vision and translate this vision into academic terms.